The Definition of Shredding
The Future of Ultimate is Shredding
A couple of weeks ago, I met with Mike Lun while he was out here on the East Coast and we were chatting about the game and he asked me for a definition of Shredding.
Over the years, I’ve been asked over and over again what Shredding is, or if I can define what Shredding is and it’s not something I can answer in 25 words or less. Shredding is much, much more than just a revolutionary new offense in Ultimate Frisbee. Shredding is a way of life.
Nonetheless, I’ll do my best to explain what Shredding is with regards to Ultimate.
There seems to be a lot of confusion and ambiguity over what is and isn’t Shredding so I wanted to sit down and attempt to articulate exactly what Shredding actually is.
The challenge is explaining what Shredding is however, how do you explain to someone, who doesn’t know the meaning of the word sweet, what sugar is?
You can’t.
Try it.
So how can I explain what Shredding is, or provide a definition for Shredding, when you have no reference frame for what it is?
Well, Shredding is kinda like the dynamic action shown in this photo…
Because teaching humans how to Shred has been so incredibly elusive during these past few decades, over the past twenty-four months I’ve traveled all over South America, Asia and Africa training some of the most intelligent and athletic primates from around the world how to Shred.
The results have been nothing short of astonishing.
Ultimate will never be the same.
If you think this Baboon [above] is about to travel, think again. If it’s me, I’m throwing that disc just before the left foot comes off the ground, totally legal. Extremely explosive. Completely unstoppable.
When I'm shredding, my complete strategy is to run with the disc, as often as possible, in any direction possible, as fast as possible and to the extent that the defense is willing to allow me (there is almost always a direction that the defense is allowing me to run freely with the disc). It doesn't matter where, how, why, I just run with the disc [legally] as the primary strategy.
The first three rules of Real Estate? Location, location, location. The first three rules of Shredding in ultimate? Run with the disc, run with the disc, run with the disc.
Everything else is secondary.
The reason for making running with the disc such a paramount importance is is that the rules themselves give players tremendous powers when they run with the disc that they relinquish when they don’t. Virtually nobody understands this.
The more you show the defense just how powerful you are (to be more precise, how powerful the rules make you), the more you have control over the defense.
The more you do place running with the disc legally as your highest priority when you play the game, the more you will realize that the entire way that everybody on the planet plays the game is just plain dumb. You’ll come to know that there’s not a single coach who knows what the hell they are talking about, that every player who thinks they are an expert is learning disabled, that everyone who has ever written for Ultiworld has wasting everyone’s time and that anyone who has ever done play by play broadcasting is engaging in cosplay.
For some strange reason, over the past several decades, millions of people in the Ultimate Frisbee community have had their understanding if how to play the game stunted. This is a self-evident fact.
The way everybody plays the game today makes the defense more powerful. When you do this, you are giving your power away for no good reason. Why would you want to make the defense more powerful when you are on offense? That's the stupidest thing any athlete can do in any sport, and yet basically anyone who’s played Ultimate Frisbee the game over the past 50 years has routinely done this.
It’s crazy.
For many decades, players have made the game of Ultimate Frisbee much harder than it needs to be and therefore, far more unnecessarily dangerous than it needs to be.
When and if the Ultimate community every figures out collectively how to shred, they’ll realize just how much harder they made the game , for no good reason.
Definition of Shredding
Shredding is a completely different paradigm for the game that involves different skills, different thinking, different street cred and different wisdom.
So what is Shredding?
Shredding is:
A skillset that seemingly no one else in today’s game has
A mindset that seemingly no one else in today’s game has
A strategy that seemingly no one else in today’s game has
An attitude that seemingly no one else in today’s game has
A philosophy that seemingly no one else in today’s game has
It will take me some time for me to break down each one of these.
I have to warn you though, that when you realize what shredding is, you’re going to be embarrassed at how simple and uncomplicated it is. You all make Ultimate so much more difficult than it needs to be.
At the end of the day, Ultimate is a very easy game.
(1) The Shredding Skillset
In a nutshell, Shredding is a legal way of running with the disc in Ultimate Frisbee.
Shredding pushes the envelope on what you can and cannot get away with legally to be able to dribble the disc at an extremely high velocity.
This really isn’t very complicated. What Shredding is actually is a major shift in emphasis on which skills to highlight and become prominent and which skills to deemphasize and deprioritize.
Two major components of this skillset are things that you will think are impossible to do when you’re playing at an elite level.
These two things are (a) decelerating into your catches and (b) catching with a throwing grip.
Most players I’ve asked agree that if there is an offensive system that guaranteed your reception won’t result in a turnover if you decelerated into catches, it would be preferable to be able to slow down into a catch.
Shredding is that offensive system.
This is because Shredding puts such an inordinate amount of pressure on the defense that you can let up some of this pressure at the last minute in order to decelerate into the catch. As a point of fact, you’re ability to successfully decelerate into your receptions is proportionate to the amount of pressure you’ll be able to apply on the defense (thereby perpetuating your ability to decelerate into your catches).
Similarly, when I ask players the same question about an offensive system that guaranteed your reception won’t result in a turnover if you catch the disc with a throwing grip, they agree that this would be superior. They’re skeptical however and they just don’t believe such an offensive system exists.
It does exist and it’s called Shredding. These two components (decelerating into receptions and catching with a throwing grip) go hand in hand.
If applying pressure to the defense is the name of the game in Shredding, immediately being a throwing threat upon reception is a lot like being born pregnant. In other words, because pressure is the engine that powers Shredding, by being able to immediately apply pressure at the moment the plastic hits your hand, there’s zero wasted time in both decelerating into receptions and catching with a throwing grip.
Interestingly enough, the two most important cornerstones you will learn on your road to becoming an elite Shredder (deceleration into receptions and catching with a throwing grip), are two skills that most “elite” coaches and players will tell you are impossible to execute successfully, consistently and reliably at the highest levels in the game.
Don’t listen to them, they don’t know what the hell they are talking about.
With these two elements as the core building blocks of Shredding, the entire body of the Shredding Skillset is therefore built upon these two basic principles (two basic principles that most players unironically discourage players from doing).
When you look at these actual photographs of primates Shredding, what you see is the sheer power, gracefulness, explosiveness, balance, ingenuity, agility and intensity of this framework.
These images capture the beauty of Ultimate Frisbee far greater than any image of a layout grab, skying catch or diving block could ever convey.
A significant portion of this skillset involved in advanced dribbling is understanding that the beginning of most Shred moves happen prior to catching the disc.
This subclass of skills should not be overlooked. A receiver’s best advantage over their defender (turned marker) is at the instant of the reception. There’s virtually always a window of opportunity that is wide open immediately upon the reception of a disc, but that window is inexplicably, invariably and immediately slammed shut by the receiver almost every single play.
This is madness.
Why is Ultimate Frisbee played like a dead-ball sport when it’s obviously not a dead-ball sport? This has been going on for 50 years.
When you watch the game, most of the time it’s played as a series of discreet, individual plays rather than a played as a continuum of flowing, nonstop motion.
Shredding changes all of that.
By premeditating how you’re going to attack (or counter attack) the defender as well as the rest of the defense prior to making the catch, you’re putting yourself in position to not only maintain this advantage, but to amplify it as well.
There’s actually a reason that dates back to Columbia High School in the 1960s of why players do this, and it would be beneficial for players to understand the history of this legacy. This artifact is a byproduct of the dead-ball catastrophe. As it turns out, Ultimate Frisbee’s design and game mechanics are based on a dead-ball paradigm and so everyone plays the game as if it’s a dead-ball sport, in spite of the fact that it’s obviously not a dead-ball sport.
The Pledge
When I’m flushing, prior to even catching the disc, I’ve got me foot choreography mapped out, when and where I’ll have established my balance, my planned primary attack vector, my anticipated throwing grip and throw and my contingency counter moves in the event that my primary options are unavailable.
This part of the shredding skillset is what I refer to as The Pledge. It’s showing something to the defense, in plain sight, that looks and appears to be completely ordinary and simple. There’s this expression in sports “He makes it look so easy” and that’s the essence of the Pledge. As my daddy used to say ‘if you can’t dazzle ‘em with your brilliance, baffle ‘em with your bullshit’.
The Pledge is a little of both.
A significant portion of the Pledge is decelerating into receptions and catching the disc with a throwing grip.
When you do these, you’re showing the defense in no uncertain terms your mastery over the game in the most basic form of communication; by the simple act of demonstration.
The true power from the Pledge comes from the fact that the execution of the Pledge is initiated prior to the catch (and often times even prior to when the hardwood* releases it)
Occasionally the initiation of the Pledge actually begins prior to the intermediary in the first place. In other words, sometimes prior to me initiating the throw that establishes the primary dribble, I’ve already pre-planned my next move in anticipation of me getting the disc back. When I’m dealing, I can have 4-6 subsequent moves all queued up in my head before they are executed, but I digress.
*hardwood refers to the players that facilitate dribbling by allowing you to ‘bounce’ the disc off of them.
Embedded in all of this notion of deliberation of how I’m going to put myself in the best possible position to Shred (meaning continuing and maintaining my ability to run with the disc) is an arsenal of elemental tactics available for deployment as potentially a component of every dribble.
This skillset is like a mechanic’s massive toolbox that includes planting either pivot foot, a versatile array of throws (air bounces, lifts, shapes, throwing with either hand, idling, crossovers, stunts, up and under moves, dribble fakes, etc.
Again, in and of themselves, none of these tactics are rocket science or necessarily revolutionary (well, the stunt move is pretty damn sweet), but what is revolutionary is the fact that the skillset creates a framework ostensibly geared towards legally running with the disc.
In other words, the skills are simple and shredding is simple, getting people to think differently is the real challenge.
The Turn
The subset of Shredding skills involved with the reception, establishing balance, pressuring the defense, getting into a new attack posture, etc. is what I call The Turn.
You can think of the Turn as what a skateboarder or snowboarder is doing on the half-pipe, every time that they are in the air at either side of the pipe. In spite of the fact that they are airborne, they are balanced, coherent and in control (and everything they are doing was premeditated as part of their Pledge that they were using to set up The Turn).
The skillset involved in the Turn is neither revolutionary nor particularly advanced, but it’s the redistribution of emphasis on a variety of skills that’s what makes this part of shredding a completely different paradigm for playing Ultimate Frisbee.
I will get into the mindset, strategy, attitude and philosophy of Shredding later in this article, but for now, just understand that the skillset in Shredding is radically different than the skillset required for conventional [legacy] Ultimate. The footwork is different, the fakes are different, the throw selection is significantly different, etc.
The Turn typically is what I call “Flipping the Defense”. The objective is to re-emerge, with the disc, on the weakside of the D. Imagine if you could instantly teleport, with the disc, to the weakside! Rather than having all your receivers fronted by their respective defenders, all your receivers would be wide open to you in your new location.
The strong-side is the area of the field that the defense has the edge because they are forcing you to play one way and are set up in anticipation of you attempting to throw in that direction.
This is what the Turn is, it’s flipping the weakside to the strongside and vice versa. In this play, the Shredder re-emerges with the disc behind enemy lines on the weakside, penetrating the defensive vulnerability.
This is what is commonly referred to as ‘breaking down a defense’.
By penetrating into the weakside with the disc, the Shredder (1) now has five receivers open in this example.
It’s Magic.
Most players would be content to have accomplished flipping the defense and they want to opportunistically want to take advantage of the target right environment that they just created but not a true Shredder.
The true Shredder wants more. A true Shredder wants to completely dismantle the defense and he does so by counter attacking directly back into the teeth of the defense…
The Prestige
The last category or subset of the skillset for Shredding is what I call The Prestige. These are the skills specifically suited for wreaking havoc on the defense when they are at their most vulnerable and counter attacking them before they have the chance to re-established themselves and this is where the term Shredding really comes from.
You might say that it’s The Prestige that separates Shredding from just dribbling.
In a Magician’s performance, The Prestige is where the person conducting the magic trick culminates it with the grand finale. It’s where the magician makes the woman who was just sawed in half reappear, topping the trick he just conducted where her head appeared to be severed.
After breaking down the defense, the defenders scramble to fortify their positions and stop the bleeding, so to speak. The strong becomes the weak and the weak become the strong.
In Shredding, The Prestige is the set of skills required to counter flip the defense after you just flipped them. This is the essence of shredding.
The Turn, is where you’ve executed the preliminary magic trick (effortlessly making a reception against a lock down defense), but the Turn isn’t the real Magic. The real Magic is the Prestige, which is where the Shredder has baited the defense into a simple deception, only to confound them with the true slight of hand, The Counter Flip.
Once again, after flipping the defense again, what had initially been the original strong-side, is now the weak-side but now the Shredder has five open receivers as a result of flipping the defense twice.
I can do this all day. It’s a methodology for playing the game that is destructive, fun, joyful, intellectually stimulating and not coincidentally, extremely entertaining.
This on-field action of undulation of the defense’s momentum back and forth, side to side is not dissimilar to a snowboarder shredding back and forth down a mountain on their snowboard down a double black diamond slope.
The thing is, when you throw to the endzone, one of two things always happen. A) you end up playing defense or B) you end up playing defense.
I don’t know about you, but all things being equal, I’d rather be SHREDDING.
This above series of diagrams is somewhat hypothetical, as every situation is different, but it’s just a visualization tool to allow me a way to mansplain how Shredding can be used to repeatedly “Flip the Defense” and to continually joystick the D to gain, maintain and amplify the advantage you have over them.
The true advantage an accomplished Shredder has over the defense is in their core understanding of the framework for the game and the rules. Shredding is just a way of capitalizing on the offensive bias that is foundation to those rules. Once you understand this, it’s foolish not to exploit these loopholes.
The skillset, mindset, strategy, attitude and philosophy of Shredding are then all applied to perpetuate this Magic Show in a continual attack, counter attack array of assaults on the defenders until you’ve beaten the defense into submission. The more you Shred, the softer the defensive posture becomes and the softer the defensive posture becomes, the more you’ll be able do things that you thought were impossible (such as decelerating into catches, for example)
This is really the fun part of Shredding as it combines intellect and gamesmanship with skill, leverage, balance and efficiency.
In The Turn, we flipped the defense and re-emerged on the weakside with the disc. In The Pledge, just when the defense had nearly finished recalibrating their alignment to establish a defensive presence on the new strongside, you cut against the grain directly into the path of the oncoming defensive realignment, now re-emerging back on the original strongside, but with the defense in shambles. Wash.Rinse.Repeat.
You do this until you’ve gained the mental edge over your opponent. Once they know, that you know, that they know, that you can do what you want, when you want, how you want, you’ve won the war of wills.
(2) The Shredding Mindset
Initially, when you begin to dribble, if you’re good you’ll begin to realize your ability to put the defenders on their heels and stay one step ahead of the defense. As this evolves, you’ll begin to develop a mindset oriented towards getting and keeping the defense off balance.
I would label this elementary mindset as basically the Checkers mindset. It’s simple, it works and it’s based on truth, but it’s simplistic. The true Shredding mindset comes when playing Ultimate Frisbee becomes playing the game within the game. It takes the embryonic thinking of dribbling that is akin to playing checkers, to the advanced and sophisticated thinking of Shredding, which is like playing 3-dimensional chess. in cleats.
At his very best, maybe around 10 years ago, Dylan Freechild really never got established in the Checkers mindset, as far as I can tell.
As good as he was back in the day, mostly he was running around like a chicken with his head cut off, never really grasping or internalizing both the effect he was having on the defense or ways to exploit this effect.
In this short clip, Freechild “flips the defense” and re-emerges with the disc on the weakside of the D, but if you watch the full point, the play runs out of steam and they turn the disc over. It’s actually at the precise moment that he flips the defense that he inexplicably gives up possession of the disc. Right when he had the defense right where he wanted them, he gave it all away.
Instead of throwing that last throw at the top of the field, he could have counter-flipped the D back towards the near sideline (the new ‘weakside’).
You can see in this short clip that had he done so, he’s got a teammate completely wide open out on the flat on this side of the field. The reason that player is wide open is because his defender had peeled off to check Dylan’s penetration move in the first place.
In other words, it was Spikezilla’s own penetration move that resulted in that player being completely open. That’s the kind of effect that Shredding routinely and predictably has on the defense.
In fact, all Dylan is doing here is simply running a series of give-go moves here and nothing much else. It’s not even dribbling, to be fair. There are no counter attacks, no intentionality or deliberation and no perceivable use of the leverage that he obviously has (but is completely unaware of).
Shredding begins where Counter-flipping the D begins…
In the above diagrams that represent flipping and counter flipping the defense, I’ve see Freechild flip the D many times, but he then chases the fool’s gold of the target rich environment and more times than not, the offense would stall and result in a turnover.
He never evolved his game beyond the Checkers stage of dribbling and of course, he never played for a coach who had a clue on what to do in these situations.
All the current players associated with dribbling, like Ronald McDonnell, Johnny Walks (a lot), Jonathon Nevershreds, Johnny Banned-from-the-field, etc, are not as explosive or agile as Spikezilla in his prime.
To be clear, if none of these players (or anyone else for that matter) never really got to the stage of playing checkers with their dribbling acumen, there’s no way in hell any of them ever got to anywhere near possessing a Shredding mindset.
A Shredding mindset begins to see individual penetration dribbles as a dime a dozen, as a commodity.
These moves are there for the taking almost at will. When you start to pay attention, the defense is literally and constantly giving you a dribble, you just need to be looking for them. There is virtually always a dribble available and usually several. The solo dribble move begins to become like a pawn in this game of 3-D Chess. You learn to use them and sacrifice them in order to gain an even larger advantage.
The layer above that, the dribble fakes, the up and under moves, the crossover dribbles and counter attacks are then what you might want to think of as the Knights on your chessboard.
They’re more versatile than the pawns but still limited in scope. Beyond this layer are the stunt moves, play action plays, counter attacks, pick and rolls, counter flares, etc. and this class of compound tactics could be considered Rooks and Bishops.
The Shredding Mindset, therefore is gaining an innate and intimate understanding of not only the effect that each of these tactics has on the defense, but acquiring a second nature for when and how to sacrifice some of these to deploy others in order to be able to completely pwn the defense.
Within this mindset, by default, you’ll be making all the other players around you better players because your success in this 3D game is predicated on their success.
The more powerful you make each of these other chess pieces, the more powerful you’ll become and the more powerful you become, the more fun and effortless Ultimate Frisbee becomes.
As this happens, what you will come to realize is that virtually every belief and assumption you have about how the game has to be played are all misguided and that in fact, none of them are true.
Players, coaches, teams and the community have held these beliefs to be true for decades but they’ve never been tested scientifically. To be fair, I don’t even think anyone playing the game today even knows what these underlying beliefs or assumptions are or even where they came from, they just take them as Gospel.
(3) The Shredding Strategy
When it comes to strategy (def. a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall objective), this plan or policy can be something that’s more organizational or decided by a coaching staff for a particular game or opponent or whatever, but obviously a given team’s strategy for a given game would be dramatically different for a team that understands Shredding compared to the decisions made by a legacy coach.
In football, there used to be a strategy of establishing the running game to set up the passing game. You can’t even think about running a play-action pass in American Football, if the defense doesn’t honor your running game (because you don’t have one).
In ultimate Frisbee, Shredding is your running game. The more you establish that you can run on your opponent (in other words Shred on your opponent), the more you’ll get wide open passes and hucks. Furthermore, the more you Shred, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to throw higher quality throws because you’ll be throwing with sound throwing mechanics.
The San Francisco’s Bill Walsh developed his ‘West Coast’ offense that turned the age old adage of establishing a running game to set up a passing game on its ear by throwing a lot of passes where that YAC (yards after catch were much longer than the pass itself. By establishing the passing game as a viable option, it made the running game even more potent.
The overriding strategy in shredding is similar to the strategy of Bill Walsh’s West Coast Offense in that the short pass of the the dribble and the YAC has the effective quality of achieving the objective of softening up the defense, in order to set up the running game.
The plan of action of combining Shredding and shorter passes achieves the major aim of dictating tempo and taking control over the game. Once you take over control of the tame, you can being to huck with superior throwing mechanics, dunk on the defense with your best circus throws and basically humiliate your opponent.
(4) The Shredding Attitude
A common feedback that I’ve consistently received from players who’ve learned the basics of Shredding is just how liberating it is. They feel empowered by the framework and emboldened by the freedom it gives them.
In Shredding, you’re not only allowed to be more creative, resourceful, dynamic and flashy, you’re encouraged to be. This level of emancipation from the rigid confinement of legacy offenses where you’re relegated to performing a restricted duty as a role playing automaton can’t help but bring a new attitude along with it.
The more you learn to Shred, the more you begin to learn that just about everything you coach is asking you to do is complete nonsense. It’s no wonder why the coaches, commissioners, governing bodies, “journalists” and opinion leaders don’t want Shredding to take over the sport, they’d be exposed for the frauds that they are.
The sheer power given to players under the Shredding paradigm gives them such a supremely confident attitude that they can literally tell the defense what they’re about to do, and still to it.
I’m going to throw a off-hand, backhand lift, stunt move on you and completely annihilate your ability to defend me and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
It’s a “I’ve trained harder than you, I’ve studied more film than you, I’ve worked harder than you, I’m practiced more than you, my team is better than yours and we’ve prepared more than yours and we’re going to destroy you” attitude.
The Shredding Attitude is brash, it’s fearless, it’s merciless and it’s an infectiously competent attitude.
Why not? It ain’t bragging if you can back it up and when you learn to shred, you begin to know through experience that you can’t be stopped. Nothing wrong with a little trash talk.
It’s a scorched Earth, take no prisoners, boot on your neck and never let up kind of attitude. The Shredding Attitude is a “stop with your incessant traveling violations and try to beat me legally” kind of attitude.
Shredding is a “I’m sorry I destroyed you so badly with that last stunt move, allow me to let you catch up, so I can destroy you again” attitude.
Ultimate Frisbee had a bit of this attitude in the 80s, to some extent during the Uglimate era, but it’s long gone now. It’s time we brought it back.
The Uglimate Era wasn’t necessarily all bad, there was a passion about playing the game that has long since been dormant, but the era did reveal the fact that Ultimate Frisbee’s ideology was fractured and had bifurcated. It could have gone in two different directions but only one could prevail and the version that prevailed was the beta-male, milquetoast, whiny, passive observer rendition of the game, rather that the Kenny Dobyns and Pat King version.
That’s really too bad too.
(5) The Shredding Philosophy
The word philosophy comes from two latin words, philos and sophia. Love of and Wisdom. Philosophy means the love of wisdom and the wisdom behind shredding is the simple truth that with a large enough lever, a child can move a mountain.
The lever used in Shredding is the knowledge of the Triple Threat Principle. It’s an embarrassingly simple aphorism, the triple threat principle is. All it says is that an ultimate player who presents the three threats of shredding, passing or scoring has more leverage over the defense than a player whose only threats are passing and scoring.
It’s that simple people. It’s not rocket science. Shredding creates so much leverage that a 64 year old, out of shape man can go out and play in a tournament tomorrow and dominate, as long as he understands how to wield this lever.
The fact of the matter is when you know you have to simultaneously guard against me hucking while guarding against me passing to another teammate and also guard against me dribbling, I’ve got you beat before I even take a step onto the field.
A large part of the reason for this is that Ultimate Frisbee’s primary game Meta is that it’s a dead-ball sport and when I’m shredding, there is never a dead-ball stoppage of play, even when I have a pivot foot down. I’m constantly threatening you with my ability to dribble drive and as a defender, you have to honor that threat every single time or I’ll eat your lunch.
Your coach doesn’t want you to know this because your coach runs a dead-ball oriented offense. Why? Because whomever your coach is, and I know them all, doesn’t know what they are talking about. Have you ever wondered how a coach in ultimate Frisbee ever came to be a coach? I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t because they once were a great player. Because they weren’t. Not a single one of them.
Where’s the wisdom in playing for a coach who was a mediocre player?
I can understand that you want to believe that this is true, but you simultaneously don’t want this to be true. Because to come to the realization that this is true means coming to terms with the realization that everything you thought was true about the game is incorrect. It means all the training you’ve done, all the hard work you’ve put in have all been for naught. It means accepting the fact that every point you’ve scored, every game you’ve been victorious in and every tournament, accolade and championship you’ve won are meaningless.
I get that.
But where is the wisdom in that?
Wouldn’t you want to know the truth, in spite of the ramifications? Do you have the courage and valor to rise up and look the truth in the face?
So, I’ve written about the Skillset, the Strategy, the Mindset, the Attitude and the Philosophy of Shredding, but I still haven’t defined what Shredding is. That’s because sometimes you can’t tell people, you have to show them. I’m nearly 65 and before I die, I’d really like to show you.
You’ll love it.
The Future of Ultimate
The conditions in Salt Lake City for the UFA Championship weekend were flat out gnarly. It was like The British Open in golf being played on a breezy day at St. Andrews, or the NFC Title Game being played at Lambeau Field in a snowstorm.
It was perfect conditions for Champion level players to rise to the challenge and to separate the wheat from the chaff and guess what…?? Not a single player was able to Shred the Gnar.
The thing about Shredding is that it vastly improves a player’s as well as an entire team’s throwing skills. What we saw in Salt Lake City was an entire class of ultimate players who were exposed for their inability to deal with a little breeze. The Breeze couldn’t even handle a little breeze. Sad.
There players were all poorly trained or prepared. That’s just a fact. No excuses.
I recently heard the the DC Breeze is running an offense that incorporates Shredding, but I have my doubts. There’s only one person in the world capable of coaching Shredding and he’s got nothing to do with DC.
Here’s a short sequence with the Breeze throwing a sequence of short passes but this ain’t shredding; hell, it's not even dribbling. All I see here is an opportunistic series of short passes that were readily available immediately after a turnover because the defense never got the opportunity to set up. Does it work or is effective? Well, you’d have to define what those two words even mean, but sure it resulted in a score against a team not really playing any defense so I guess it’s ok.
This kind of ‘small-ball’ kind of ultimate has been going on for many decades. The SF Jam team ran their ‘Plink-O’ offense that looked a lot like this, and while people in the Bay Area who knew me, knew that it was a knock-off of ‘Frank’s Offense’, it definitely was not Shredding and neither is what the Breeze is doing on this point.
I live for conditions like that. It separates the contenders from the pretenders.
At the USAU’s Triple Crown Tour (TCT) Pro Championships 2024 in Rock Hill, SC on labor day weekend a couple of weeks ago, I drove down to check out the State of The Game. It was a short two hour drive from Boone, NC and I wanted to see up close and personal what the game’s status is.
It was a complete disgrace. Traveling violations have reached an all time high. Everybody knows this is true, they just don’t care. The skill level has regressed as many veteran players have quit the game and the younger players haven’t filled the void.
What stood out to me most, however, was the android nature of how the game is played.
If I were to break down the film with any player, coach or organization and on any given instance ask “what’s about to happen” (in terms of pivot, throw, alignment, etc.) almost everyone would be able to accurately predict what’s about to happen.
But then if I asked any of these people why?, I seriously doubt that anyone could actually articulate the reason behind why a player is about to do what they end up doing.
And of those few people who understand the reasoning and logic behind the player’s actions and were able to successfully communicate it, what you would realize is that it’s all a lie.
None of it is even remotely true but you were never allowed to question it. If you did, you were treated like a leper and ostracized from the community.
Players are all running around like robots, recreating the same scenarios over and over again without ever once questioning why. Why are we playing this way? Why is it, that in a game with an overwhelming offensive bias built into the rules, are we running an offense that allows the defense to dictate tempo?
It’s unadulterated insanity.
After 55 years as a sport, the Ultimate Frisbee event I witnessed in Rock Hill last week was just sad.
There’s no growth in this game. There’s no proof or even any evidence that paying Crawford over $2,000,000 helped the game grow a single bit.
There’s not a single compelling argument to convince anyone that the game is flourishing. It is not. It’s withering on the vine, suffocating on its own toxic ideology.
Player Safety
These photographs of monkeys shredding contrast sharply with the Demolition Derby quality of legacy ultimate, where ending up on the ground seems to be considered the pinnacle of excellence.
This point cannot be overstated.
Possibly the most compelling argument that can be made for this paradigm (of which there are many cogent and salient arguments) is that Shredding is easily a much safer way to play the game, by at least an order of magnitude.
Over ninety percent of the injuries in Ultimate Frisbee simply wouldn’t happen if everyone knew just how radically shredding changes the game.
I think the question here isn’t why is Shredding significantly safer than legacy ultimate, but rather why is legacy ultimate so injury prone?
Getting Horizontal
When you pull up Ultimate Frisbee on Google and do an image search, well over 95% of the photographs are of someone laying out for a catch, diving horizontally for a block or roofing some for a skying grab, all of which are the end results of mediocre throws. Hell, the new UFA logo is a silhouette of someone laying out. They’re literally glorifying mediocrity.
MKB’s photo in this montage is the only one that looks like a player is actually throwing a quality throw. Hell, it even looks like he just may be dribbling. Other than that, an online image search of ultimate frisbee yields pages and pages of players laying out for a disc…..boring.
I’ll take any one of these photos of monkeys shredding over virtually any other Ultimate Frisbee photograph online. They all exemplify the power, ferocity, beauty, gracefulness, balance and intensity of Ultimate Frisbee far more than any of these layout photographs ever can.
Ultimate Frisbee shouldn’t be about going horizontal, it should be about staying vertical.
Just in this past week, 4 different people I know all mentioned playing pickle ball recently. All random conversations. Pickleball is going off, Ultimate Frisbee is an embarrassment.
The offenses are the same basic stale and stagnant offenses we’ve seen for decades, the cheating is off the charts, the bottom four teams in the men’s division at Rock Hill had absolutely no business being at a national caliber Pro Championship tournament and nobody cares.
Shredding changes all of that. When Shredding begins to dominate the scene, a significant number of elite athletes will begin playing the game because of the high skill level and excitement it brings to the game.
Spectators will flock to tournaments and events because Shredding is orders of magnitude more entertaining than legacy ultimate is.
Players will stop committing so many traveling violations because they’ll realize that there’s a better way to play, legally.
Look, say what you will about me but I can say this much and it all boils down to this:
either I’m completely full of shit, or I’m not.
It’s that simple.
and guess what…..?
I’m not.
*The team I began in 1989 to focus exclusively on developing and advancing Shredding was called Monkeyshine.
This article is dedicated to that team and the group of guys who joined me and supported me on that quest.
I had a lot of fun training these monkeys how to shred and taking photos of them and I’ve shared some of my favorites but there were far too many to fit into this article so I put together this short video of some of the best of the rest…..enjoy!!
weird